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I've been having this problem for nearly a year now and I nor any of my computer friends know what could be causing it.

My system hangs up every 10-20 minutes for about 2-3 minutes ONLY IF a web browser is open.

It doesn't have to be active. I don't have to be browsing. I could have it open, minimized and let it sit and eventually I can see the activity light come on on my tower while my hard drive and/or CPU seem to be going insane. The whole system is bogged down and it will get to the point I can't even click on anything and everything just hangs up. After a few minutes, it immediately stops and everything resumes as normal.

Nothing else causes this. I can be playing a new video game, rendering video, talking on Skype, all of that at once, etc, for hours on end and my system is fine. But if I have 1 tab on a browser open, the whole system will hang up as described above. It doesn't even matter which web browser. I've used Chrome regularly for years now, but out of my multiple attempts to try to resolve the issue, I've also tried using Internet Explorer (lol), Firefox and Opera. Doesn't matter which I use, same effect. And again, only web browsers do this. If I have a browser open and try to do something else, like playing a video game for example, it'll freeze the game while it's doing whatever it's doing for a few minutes. I just sit there and take deep breaths and try not to throw it out of the window. lol

One weird thing did happen recently that might be a clue to something: I was watching a video on YouTube. It was fairly lengthy and I wasn't doing anything else. Naturally, the system hung up even though it was just sitting there and froze the video to where the wheel came up like it was buffering or what have you. I noticed the activity light stopped but the video was still frozen and my CPU was still going nuts according to Task Manager. When I refreshed the page, the video started playing normally and the CPU immediately went back to functioning normally.

I know all of that is a lot of info and, in all honesty, I would just reformat the drive if I could. But my secondary 2TB HDD kicked the bucket last year and I have nothing to back up all of my data on to at the moment in order to do so, and I can't just afford to go buy a new one at the moment. So I'm stuck still searching for what I could possibly do to fix this. It's literally the only issue my computer has and I'm getting more gray hairs because of it.

Possibly. Antivirus scans are only as good as their signature files. I'm guessing you keep yours up to date, but it's still possible they missed it.

Also, did you check to make sure your firewall isn't blocking your browsers? Refer back to my earlier link on how to check that.

The firewall is one of the things I tried before and forgot to mention. I've tried so many things, I can't remember them all off the top of my head. lol But yeah, I still double-checked everything and it's not blocking anything. I even tried turning it off all together at one point. Which wasn't wise, but it didn't take long for the issue to continue anyways that I realized that wasn't it to turn it back on.

ESET will then download updates for itself, install itself, and begin scanning your computer. Please be patient as this can take some time.

When the scan completes, click List Threats

Click Export, and save the file to your desktop using a unique name, such as ESETScan. Include the contents of this report in your next reply.

Click the Back button.

Click the Finish button.

NOTE:Sometimes if ESET finds no infections it will not create a log.

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